


gotta get to the bottom of this (if it kills me)

by honeybeebutch



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: 5+1, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2020-01-06
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:13:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21908758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honeybeebutch/pseuds/honeybeebutch
Summary: Five times Jon hit rock bottom and one time he didn't.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 41
Kudos: 202





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Second fanfiction in a week, I'm on a ROLL. Title from Hand My My Shovel, I'm Going In! by Will Wood and the Tapeworms, which is about not feeling like you deserve help until you've absolutely sunk as low as you can, which is, dare I say, a Jon mood.
> 
> Okay, not all of these are rock bottom, the first chapter certainly isn't, but I promise it gets worse. This man does not have a singular healthy coping mechanism I stg.

It’s an adjustment, Martin living in the Archives after being under siege by Jane Prentiss. Suddenly someone might actually notice the frankly unhealthy hours he kept, though he’s not about to _stop_ staying late, not when the stakes have gotten so high. He’s still trying to organize the files left behind by Gertrude, an endeavor that will take months at least, no matter how late he stays, and now sifting through paper statements looking for any mention of worms, or insects, or Jane… well, his work is never done. And with the silvery worms multiplying on the sidewalk outside the Institute, more each day, he needs answers as quickly as possible.

Currently, it’s late, has been dark outside for hours, and Jon _was_ thrumming with manic energy following the recording of a seemingly relevant statement, but he can feel himself burning out now. Martin is sitting cross legged on his office floor, surrounded by piles of papers. Jon hasn’t asked what his sorting criteria are, but the way his brow is furrowed belies his focus, and Jon knows he wants to solve this problem as much as anyone. Jon himself is skimming papers for names, but the words are running together, and his eyes are sliding off the page, and fatigue is pulsing through him, countless sleepless nights finally catching up. This statement isn’t what they need, he decides, and rests his face on his hand as he sets it down in the general direction of his “irrelevant” pile, and he blinks, and-

He wakes up and his face is sore from the hard wood of the desk. His arm is all pins and needles from the awkward angle it had been folded into. He startles at the feeling, at the realization that he had actually fallen asleep, in the middle of researching, and he flaps his hand to shake out the sensation. In doing so, he dislodges a blanket from his shoulders. It’s fairly thin fleece, and he tentatively lifts a corner to his face, on a hunch and a whim. He had not necessarily been aware that Martin had a smell, but the blanket smells undeniably like him in an unplacable sense memory sort of way. Sometime last night he had fallen asleep at his desk and Martin retrieved his own blanket and draped it over his shoulders. His piles on the floor have been neatly stacked, clipped together and labeled with hand scrawled sticky notes: “Jane Prentiss”, “Bugs (but not Jane)”, and a larger pile: “Irrelevant”. Martin himself is nowhere to be seen, presumably having gone back to his own cot in document storage. There’s no window in the office, but the wall clock reads 7:30 in the morning. He feels… more well rested than usual, though sleeping at his desk certainly won’t help his back problems. He can already feel the twinges of pain as he sits up and straightens out. Ah, well. Being hunched over and sleeping is probably better than being hunched over and not sleeping.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers through MAG 40.

Jon has kind of a thing about not being able to breathe. He’s not sure why – he’s not asthmatic, doesn’t have anything in his past that could clearly attribute itself to a trauma response; being unable to breathe is just particularly frightening for him. Which is why handling the CO2 canisters is more than a little unsettling. It _is_ the best way to kill the silver worms, but he can’t stop thinking about what human lungs do and don’t like, and how large amounts of carbon dioxide is on the latter list. The fact that Elias recently changed the fire suppression system to gas instead of sprinklers, and that Sasha tripped the alarm on her way out, well, it makes him wonder if the slight burning in his lungs is exertion or panic or if it’s the beginnings of carbon dioxide toxicity.

Which doesn’t help the panic.

So he’s going to sit here and wonder idly if CO2 is heavier or lighter than ambient air, if he should stay on the floor or try to get nearer to the ceiling, but then Tim bursts through the wall. He’s almost delirious, humming with nervous energy that’s more indicative of adrenaline than carbon dioxide poisoning, which only puts his mind a little bit at ease. He does admit he’s lightheaded, and if carbon dioxide _does_ sink, then the tunnels might not be great for all of their continued existences, but it’s that or stay trapped in document storage, so he tucks his pants into his socks and follows Tim.

They lose Martin in the tunnels, because of _course_ they lose Martin in the tunnels. The pain in his leg and their continual movement have been keeping his mind off of the panic, but when he and Tim find the trapdoor, he’s almost certain the straining in his lungs is from gas and not from running at this point. Or both, and if he’s going through oxygen faster _and_ the fire suppression system has been turned on, then he won’t last much longer. Tim stumbles in front of him and seems to sway on his feet, and Jon feels woozy as he leans against a wall and slides down it onto the floor instead, only dimly aware of the worms that wriggle and writhe in response to his presence. His vision swims, black spots dancing in front of him, and he’s sure the shriek that splits the air isn’t his, is certain that his throat couldn’t make such a horrific sound even if it had the breath to, but the panic is settling in and making itself at home in his hammering heartbeat, and he’s hyperventilating, and then he blacks out.

Even after getting cleared by the paramedics, there’s still work to do, and he busies himself with getting the statements of his coworkers. It’s a good distraction, but when Tim says _it could’ve been worse, a few more minutes_ , the panic threatens to come rushing back and he fights to get his breathing under control. He’s _fine_ , he just needs to keep busy and he won’t have to think about anything. It’s worked his whole life thus far, and nothing’s caught up with him yet. Eventually he limps home. The fire brigade had recovered his cane from wherever he had dropped it, but he took one look at whatever it was covered with and decided he should probably just get a new one. He doesn’t even think to try and get a cab home because he’s operating solely on autopilot by this point, and he shakes a handful of paracetamol into his palm before he collapses into bed. He’ll deal with the rest of the work in the morning. He doesn’t intend to deal with anything else, though.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edited 1/7 to correct a typo.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Early season 2.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a warning, this chapter contains some passive suicidal ideation, in the form of Jon being more than okay with it when faced with his own imminent death. It's only one line, but his responses to trauma are getting much worse now that I'm getting deeper in the podcast canon, so it's not going to get much better, going forward.

Of course Jon understands _why_ he’d had to take a month of leave from work. The traumatic experience and everything, and he _did_ have worms burrow into his skin, which required rest to heal properly. That doesn’t mean he’s not itching (metaphorically, of course, he can’t even think about scratching his skin without getting flashbacks now) to get back into the swing of things. Between the attack on the Institute and the body in the secret murder tunnels underneath the building, there’s a lot that needs to be done. A lot that needs to be researched, and investigated, and he would leave it to the police except that he knows the police aren’t good for much, especially where The Magnus Institute is concerned. So he does the only thing he can really think to do and takes a tape recorder and a torch through the trapdoor that leads to the tunnels. He’s trying not to call them secret murder tunnels, knows the absurd name will only make his anxiety worse, but it seems unfortunately accurate. And so he descends.

Which is how he gets lost. In the (secret murder) tunnels underneath his (creepy dangerous) office. His torch has full batteries, and they’d been advertised as to last for 24 straight hours, so unless something _really_ goes wrong, at least he can still see ahead of him. But the corridors themselves don’t make sense. The ground is uneven, it slopes up and down, and there are passageways that loop back on themselves and others that lead to dead ends in the stone walls. It looks like it was designed by M.C. Escher’s evil twin brother, and it feels oppressive and claustrophobic. Jon is scared, he realizes, too late to do anything about it. He thinks he might actually get trapped down here, with no way to know how to get out again, no way of knowing if there are other trapdoors he might find or if he needs to try harder to find his way back to the one in the offices. He’d been so insistent on people knowing how he inevitably died, but now he’s running out of tape and wondering why he didn’t just bring extras, of _course_ this wasn’t going to be a quick jaunt. Oh, let’s just go for a walk along the creepy underground promenade that was an actual _crime scene_ until quite recently, why don’t we.

Jon doesn’t know how long he’s been talking out loud, but he does realize the tape recorder is recording. The thoughts running through his head, and out his mouth, evidently, have been largely mocking his own poor decision making, his own recklessness, his own lack of any sort of self-preservation instincts. He really is going to get himself killed one of these days, sooner rather than later if he doesn’t _find his way out of here_. And then he stumbles on some garbage swept to one corner of _another_ dead end, and he has to laugh. Has to laugh at the idea that someone has been living under here for who knows how long, eating snack food, and that he’s probably going to get murdered just like Gertrude. They really are more similar than he thought, both with a tendency to stick their noses where they don’t belong and will likely get hurt. And really, Jon, going for a walk, alone, without telling anyone, when your leg still hasn’t healed enough to be fully operational yet? Fully operational, there’s a joke. Even if the scars were healed there’s still the chronic pain to deal with, and _no one knows you’re down here_ , for god’s sake. They really don’t teach decision making skills in archivist school, not that he’d gone to archivist school, he had an English degree, and it was doing him a lot of good here, wasn’t it? What was he going to do, analyze Shakespeare at any potential attackers until they went away?

He has to sit down then, his leg twitching in that way that means the muscles don’t like their current situation, and the floor is cold and the wall is cold against his back, and it’s oddly grounding. Not grounding enough, he thinks as he sets the torch on the ground and then scrambles, falling onto his side, to grab it when it begins to roll away. Not grounding enough, he thinks, as he clutches the torch and the recorder and his new cane to his chest, all his worldly possessions at the moment, the only _real_ things, really, and laughing is _so_ cliché as a nervous response, but he does laugh, exhausted and in pain and lost and hopeless, and his smile gradually turns to a grimace, and his laughs turn to tears, and he thinks it’d be alright if he died here alone, it’s not like he’d been a great archivist anyway – and the torch beam passes over something on the ceiling of the corridor. Something wooden. Something with rungs, waiting to be pulled down, to be climbed up, and he nearly leaves all his things behind in his hurry to throw open the trapdoor.

His office. He emerges into his office, and is struck with the memory of the story of a man who, while exploring the Paris catacombs, was found dead mere meters from the exit. He shivers, throwing himself over the lip of the trapdoor, unsure if it’s the chilling memory or if he’s trembling for some other reason. He throws the tape recorder to the floor without standing up and it pops open, the tape clattering, sliding under a shelf, and he thinks _just as well, he’d want it destroyed anyway_ , and curls in a fetal position behind his desk, taking deep, shuddering breaths, hoping to expel the panic with the air.

His documentation of this experience will be abridged somewhat, he thinks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My writing style is just "half of this paragraph is one long, rambly sentence, and I did that on purpose"


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post MAG 80.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is where the graphic description of violence tag comes in, in the memories of seeing Leitner's body. I don't think it's that graphic, but just to be safe.

He’d just gone out for a cigarette. He was gone for two minutes, hadn’t even smoked the whole thing because of his paranoia, and when he’d come back – in his office – god, it was on the walls –

He doesn’t remember leaving the institute. He doesn’t remember making the decision to go to Georgie’s flat, doesn’t even know why he would have chosen to go there (he remembers, belatedly, that going to Tim or Martin wasn’t an option because _they were still trapped somewhere in the Archives_ ), but when he comes to abruptly, he’s in a living room he only vaguely recognizes (she got a new couch, he thinks blankly) and Georgie is humming in the kitchen. She walks out to the living room with two full mugs and he clutches the blanket (has he had a blanket this whole time?) tighter around his shoulders. He clears his throat.

“What- what time is it?” It’s dark outside the window, and it was already late when he smashed the web table, though that feels like it happened ages ago. How much time had he lost?

Georgie frowns at him. “It’s nearing two in the morning, Jon. Are you – well, no, of course you’re _not_ , but are you feeling okay?”

Jon stares numbly at the mug of tea in front of him. Something green, probably herbal, given how late it was. “I don’t… How long have I been here?”

“Like a half hour, Jon. Really, are you okay?” She sets her cup down with a little too much force and he surprises himself with how hard he flinches at the noise.

“I don’t remember. I don’t know. I was at work, and everything was going wrong, and I remember needing to leave-” (backing out of the room, trembling, hands barely able to close the door behind him, the blood and the bits of skull and the pipe, the pipe with _his fingerprints_ on it) “And then nothing. And then I was here.”

“Jesus. You dissociated that bad?”

He nods, his mouth forming a grim, thin line. “I’ve had a hell of a day. And a hell of a year before that.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Even thinking about the events of the day, the table, and the door, and the tunnels, and Leitner makes his brain feel like it’s going to shut down again. He shakes his head.

“You’re going to have to eventually. So we can talk about how long you need to stay. But you can sleep on my couch tonight, at least. Okay?”

“Okay.” Jon still feels blank, like he exists a little to the left of his body, but he thinks sleep can’t hurt. He hasn’t gotten a good night’s sleep since – god, he can’t remember when. “I’m sorry, Georgie.”

“Don’t – don’t apologize.” She sighs. “I’m still your friend, and clearly you’ve been through something fucked up. I’m not gonna put you out on the street.” She turns to rummage through a closet and throws a blanket at him. “I worry about you.” And she retreats to her own bedroom, leaving him alone.

Jon doesn’t sleep that night, but not for lack of trying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one's so short!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Post MAG 101.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a warning, this chapter contains mild self harm (no weapons involved, just fingernails) and the desire to self-harm.

Jon is finding it hard to like Helen. She’s less explicitly murderous than Michael had been, but at least he’d known where he stood with Michael. Michael had wanted to kill him. Full stop. Helen is enigmatic. Her intentions are unclear, and Jon is sick of not knowing what’s going to happen to him. Given the choice, however, between more physical torture and either certain death or freedom… He doesn’t _really_ have a choice. He walks through the door,and exits into his office. His office. That’s fine. His office is better than some of the other places Helen could have dropped him. Relatively safe, seeing as he didn’t have his own flat anymore. He glances at the clock on the wall, but the numbers don’t seem to hold any meaning for him at the moment. Ah, well. His cot is in document storage, not here, but he has enough energy to drag himself to sit in his chair.

And tumbles right back onto the floor. A sitting position wasn’t an option, physically, or mentally, apparently. He lays on his side on the floor instead, flexing his hands open and closed to coax feeling back into them, and he keeps flexing them, and keeps flexing them, and his hands are getting quite sore now, but he can’t stop repeating the motion. It’s grounding, in a way. In any case, there are no real thoughts in his head. He doesn’t know if minutes or hours have passed. The soreness in his hands has almost progressed to actual pain when the door opens. He is only distantly aware of it, like he’s miles underwater and the door is somewhere on the surface. The person who had opened it drops something, and walks, maybe runs to where he’s lying on the floor. That’s fine. Dimly, Jon thinks something might be wrong, that he’s doing something wrong, but that can’t be right. He’s fine. Everything is just fine. And then the person lays a hand on his shoulder and nothing is fine and never has been.

He jackknifes off the floor, not to his feet, but enough to scramble at the touch and the memory of other hands, hard plastic touches, unkind and painful and violating, and his heart is too loud in his ears and he might be hyperventilating, he isn’t sure. The person doesn’t follow him to where he’s pressed himself against the wall as if he can sink into it. The person says something, but Jon’s head is swimming and he’s not in the room to hear it anymore, he’s in a warehouse, surrounded by waxworks, but not _good_ waxworks, and Nikola’s voice is what he hears, threatening and joking in the same breath. She’s going to _find_ him, she wanted to skin him, and he feels her fingers tracing his limbs, sharp but never drawing blood ( _couldn’t ruin the skin, after all, they needed it in the best condition it could be_ ) where she told him she was going to slice him open, peel him like an orange, and wear him while he was still alive to feel every cut of the knife. How could he think the Institute could ever be safe? She could find him anywhere, or she could send someone to find him. She probably had spies in the Institute just like Sasha.

There are no windows in his office. The door is closed. A real exit plan requires a bit more brainspace than he has, at the moment, so he settles for staying exactly where he is, trying desperately to claw himself out of his skin ( _it didn’t feel like his anymore, like it belonged to someone else, grimy and softer than it should be and the sheer sensation of his own nails scratching_ _and scraping down his arms felt real, felt necessary, felt spiteful, leaving marks on his precious skin_ ). The person is no longer in the room now, he thinks, though he couldn’t pinpoint exactly when they left. He needs to belong to himself again, needs to have something self inflicted, to prove that he is real. There are voices outside the door, trying to go unheard, but Jon knows that they are talking about him, what to do with him, and if he wasn’t so tired, maybe he would be angry at that. Or scared. He is so tired of being scared.

He doesn’t know exactly when his limited energy finally burns out and he falls asleep, but it is not restful. He doesn’t expect it to be anymore, these days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jon: head empty no thoughts  
> Jon a few minutes later: HEAD FULL TOO MANY THOUGHTS
> 
> Fun fact, I was going to write him having a catatonic episode for this chapter, but I don't know what those feel like, so instead I just dropped him into my last manic episode! 
> 
> The next one is soft, sweet jonmartin so like. just hold on. i promise its gonna be happy(ish).


	6. +1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really made ya wait for this one, huh? I'm realizing that the last chapter of anything is the hardest to write. But it's here now! Feel free to yell about that at me in the comments. Please yell at me in the comments.

Jon doesn’t have a heartbeat, after his coma. He wakes up, but the rest of him doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. Not that Martin is there to notice. He’s involved with Peter Lukas’s plan by that point, having convinced himself that he was never going to wake up, and on the rare occasions that he and Jon did speak, in those months between one end of the world and the next, he certainly doesn’t touch him. Doesn’t take Jon by the hand, feeling his narrow wrist and the pulse not-thrumming under the skin. No, Jon tells him later, before Jonah’s statement, after the Panopticon, when his chest is pressed close to Jon’s back in the single safehouse bed. He is afraid he isn’t human anymore, he tells him through tears, unable to look Martin in the eyes as he says it. He doesn’t do eye contact a lot, these days.

They had fallen into an uneasy sort of routine after the Panopticon, staying in the safehouse, going into town and trying to act like normal people. Trying to _be_ normal people. Trying to pretend Jon doesn’t feel a spike of anxiety whenever he asks someone a question, no matter how innocent it is. Trying to pretend they both don’t need to have the other within line of sight at all times, just to make sure they haven’t disappeared again. That all changes after Jonah’s statement. The world changes, of course, like Pandora’s box, all the fears having spilled from Jon’s lips into the world. And he’ll never admit it, isn’t the sort to admit to _any_ kind of struggle he might be having, but on top of everything else, now he has guilt. They both do, equally as irrational: Jon for being forced to read the invocation and Martin for not being there to stop him. They stay in the safehouse for as long as they can, until Jon wakes Martin up in the middle of the night to tell him _somet_ _hing_ _’s coming, we need to g_ _o_ , so they pack what they can, quickly and quietly, and leave out the bedroom window. They take the car, though they know it’s a risk ( _someone is looking for them, might realize they’ve taken it, might be able to follow them-_ ) and head south, toward London. Jon Knows that’s where their friends are, where they’ll find potential allies, and that’s better than all the other options.

They’re nearly there when the car breaks down, and Martin simultaneously curses and thanks their luck. They’ll have to walk the rest of the way, but it shouldn’t be more than a day or two from there on foot. He asks Jon if he thinks they’ve lost their pursuers, and his eyes go a bit glassy and distant. He nods, somewhat tentatively. It’ll have to be enough. So they pack what they can into the backpacks they had found in the safehouse, and start hiking.

They’d passed atrocities on their drive, of course, but they’d mostly driven on long stretches of lonely freeway. The city, once they enter it proper, is different. More people means more fear, and Martin clutches his wooden baseball bat – studded with nails – with white knuckles. Jon doesn’t have a weapon, didn’t have the upper body strength to use one effectively anyway, and he’s more suited to scouting, as it is. He clutches Martin’s sleeve and Watches for threats; as much as he hates the fact that he has the ability, he wasn’t going to not use it.

“Six o’ clock, Hunt.” Jon’s voice is far calmer than perhaps it should be, only a low thread of urgency running through it. Martin turns around and pads silently to the doorway they’d just walked through. He glances to Jon, who begins a countdown on his fingers. When he curls the last finger inwards, Martin swings the bat at roughly torso-height, and their would-be assailant doubles over with barely a shout of pain. A well-muscled man with sharp teeth and a sharper blade, clearly intending to get the drop on them, but you can’t surprise Beholding. Not these days. Jon turns away when Martin kneels down to finish the job. His patron has provided him with a very convenient way to take care of people without killing them, but that doesn’t mean Jon likes to watch.

Despite that encounter, the house they’re in seems relatively safe, and darkness – the regular dark of the setting sun, not the heavy, cloying Dark with a capital D – is closing in, so they stay the night. Neither of them speak beyond perfunctory questions and instructions as they set up their bedroll on the kitchen floor. They’d already discussed keeping watch, and come to the conclusion that it was unnecessary. Beholding would warn Jon if anything really bad was heading their way, and he didn’t sleep much anymore, after the coma. Martin tugs on his shoulders so he’s lying down anyway, wrapping his arms around Jon’s short, rail-thin frame.

Jon wakes early the next morning to a gentle shaking behind him, and immediately fears for the worst. If he had a heartbeat, he’s sure it would be a jackhammer in his chest. Then he hears Martin pull in a shaky, wet breath, and he Knows. Martin’s arms hover over him as if he’s unsure his touch will be welcome, and Jon presses himself closer to his front and takes Martin’s hands in his own to pull them around him. Martin’s shaking gets more pronounced, and Jon doesn’t quite know if he’s sobbing harder or if he’s just not trying to hide it anymore. Jon slowly, carefully, turns in their shared sleeping bag so that he’s facing him, and learns that a heart doesn’t need to beat for it to break. Martin is trying desperately to hide his face in the junction of Jon’s shoulder, and his tears are wet and hot on his skin. Jon lets him, and brushes a tentative thumb over his cheek, gently directing Martin’s face up to look at him. He opens his treacherous mouth, thinks better of it ( _can’t trust himself to a_ _sk questions_ _these days, not without accidentally dragging someone’s trauma out of them-_ ), closes it. Hopes his eyes convey the concern and the love well enough. Martin’s sobs redouble.

“I- I wish I could have stopped this.” He hiccups. “I should have been able to stop this.”

Jon’s voice feels hoarse from disuse. “You couldn’t have known. Neither of us could have done anything once it’d started.”

“But before that. You said – Jonah needed you to have scars from every fear. And you got the Lonely scar from me.”

Jon makes a pained, choked noise at that, but Martin doesn’t stop. “If I hadn’t left you alone, if I’d checked the statements Basira sent, if I hadn’t _loved_ you so much-” Jon is crying with him now, because that truly hits him like a blow to the gut, the implication that Martin’s capacity for love should bring about the end of days. That he should feel guilty for loving. He pulls Martin’s face back to his neck and they cry together for a while; he isn’t sure how long. Martin still mumbles wetly against his skin incoherently about trust, and what they deserve, and Jon lets him. A wave of anger hits him; anger at Jonah for making Martin feel like any of this could have been his _fault_ , anger at himself for not being strong enough to stop reading, and for daring to think they could have had that happiness. Words float into his head – “ _If we were all happy that wouldn’t actually be the end of the world_ ” – and he’s sure he’s never heard Martin say that, but it’s his voice in his mind anyway.

“We’ll make it to the Institute today. We’ll meet up with the others. They’re waiting for us.” Jon whispers into his hair.

“Do we want that?” Martin murmurs back, and Jon knows that he means _what if I put them in danger, too_.

“Yes,” he insists, because all he can do these days is insist. He’s not good for much else. “We do. We need them, and they need us. We’ve all… changed.” He doesn’t tell Martin about what he Sees, about how Beholding has affected Basira, how Daisy has dragged herself back from the brink of the Hunt, how many ghosts walk the halls of the building. “But love is the antidote to fear. Not the cause of it. You didn’t cause this.” Jon feels _I did, I did, I did_ clawing up his throat, and swallows it back down. Kisses Martin’s cheek, where the wet tears carve tracks through the older, dry ones. And they hold each other into the dawn light until they feel whole again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me: i'm gonna let Jon heal in the last chapter!  
> me: [hurts Martin instead]
> 
> I mean, Jon is healing. They both are! It's fine! It's great! Anyway I'd love some comments, if you can spare a word or two. I mean, I just dropped 1,500 of em, so I think you can spare a couple, you're just being greedy, I think /s


End file.
